Lisa Kudrow really will be there for you.
Craig Robinson learned that lesson in a memorable way while shooting a scene for a tenth season episode of Friends. Back in 2004, Robinson only had a few credits to his name, from single-episode spots on series like LAX and The Bernie Mac Show, to a role on the short-lived FX comedy Lucky. Then came an opportunity to play opposite Kudrow, who had become one of TV’s biggest stars after 10 years on the beloved sitcom.
“I ended up working with Lisa later. We played a married couple in Table 19, actually. So we got real cool,” Robinson tells Entertainment Weekly. “But back then, it was pretty much one scene, there really wasn’t much else. We rehearsed it twice and then they did a pitch, and Lisa was cool enough to speak up for me.”
Robinson explained that while shooting his scene with Kudrow on the episode “The One with Princess Consuela,” the cast and creative crew began throwing out ideas to fine-tune the actors’ back and forth. “I had thrown out a line that she heard, but nobody else heard it. She was like, ‘We have a pitch!'”
So Robinson got to say his line, “and she got to react to it. But that was because of her, because I was just in there like, ‘I’m a freaking friend! What are you talking about?'”
Robinson appears in a brief scene in the final season’s 14th episode. Kudrow’s Phoebe Buffay goes to get her name changed following her marriage to Paul Rudd’s Mike Hannigan. She gets off on the wrong foot with Robinson’s clerk when she loudly observes, “This place is so depressing. If I worked here I’d kill myself.”
Unsure which of their last names to put before the other, Phoebe is stunned to learn that she can change her full name to anything she wants (she eventually goes with the sensible choice of Princess Consuela Banana-Hammock). “Oh, this could take a while,” she jokes, but Robinson’s character curtly replies, “Get out of my line.”
“What’s crazy about that audition is, I went early, and it was like 14 white guys dressed like limo drivers. I walked in and I was like, ‘Okay, I think I’m too early,'” Robinson recalled. But he won the role, good news he still recalls receiving. “That was a sweet moment too, to find that out, when you’re out there in Hollywood trying to make it.”